Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

OpenMW: Porting Morrowind to an open source engine

Old One

Arcane
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
3,679
Location
The Great Underground Empire
When I played Morrowind, which was maybe a year ago, I started with vanilla before moving to OpenMW. I preferred OpenMW despite it's flaws. It was much more stable overall.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,149
When I played Morrowind, which was maybe a year ago, I started with vanilla before moving to OpenMW. I preferred OpenMW despite it's flaws. It was much more stable overall.

Did you use Morrowind Code Patch with vanilla? It should make the game rock solid stability wise.
 

Old One

Arcane
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
3,679
Location
The Great Underground Empire
Did you use Morrowind Code Patch with vanilla? It should make the game rock solid stability wise.
I did. I tried a lot of different stuff to improve the stability, but I kept getting crashes. Certain areas were worse than others. What's the name of that city on the lake with all the step pyramids? That's the one that made me give up on vanilla.

OpenMW wasn't perfect by any means. In fact when I started using it they hadn't implemented (or re-implemented) shadows yet, so it looked a little strange, but at least I could walk around in the towns without worrying that the game would suddenly crash for no reason.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,149
Must be some kind of system-dependent issue, I played Morrowind with it a few years back and was fairly amazed by how stable it was. Easily several hours between crashes.
 

Alexios

Augur
Patron
Joined
Feb 18, 2014
Messages
444
Sounds like the project is in trouble judging by the 0.42 OpenCS release video. The guy went on for over a minute about how they're in desperate need of developers and the how the lack of developers is the reason why progress has been so slow.
 
Self-Ejected

Drog Black Tooth

Self-Ejected
Joined
Feb 20, 2008
Messages
2,636
Sounds like the project is in trouble judging by the 0.42 OpenCS release video. The guy went on for over a minute about how they're in desperate need of developers and the how the lack of developers is the reason why progress has been so slow.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic. This is probably the most successful from-the-ground-up engine recreation project. It's absolutely mind blowing that they managed to carefully recreate such a complex game. It's 95% complete and open source, so I wouldn't worry about it.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,149
The fact that mods are so well supported is amazing. Given all the quirks of the morrowind engine and scripting it sounds like a PITA to code.

Sounds like the project is in trouble judging by the 0.42 OpenCS release video. The guy went on for over a minute about how they're in desperate need of developers and the how the lack of developers is the reason why progress has been so slow.

More likely he's just getting a hundred emails a day demanding to know when it will be finished and wants to tell people to not annoy him unless they are ready to contribute.
 

Alexios

Augur
Patron
Joined
Feb 18, 2014
Messages
444
Seems like the attention TES3 MP has been getting is helping the development process for Open MW. Also, OpenMW 0.43 is coming out fairly soon since the last release was delayed:

https://openmw.org/2017/news-great/

It has been slightly over a month since the release of OpenMW 0.42.0. If you look back to when 0.41.0 was released, you’ll see that it took us 8 months to deliver the new version, making it perhaps one of the lengthiest releases in our history, yet in its size it isn’t that different from preceding versions.

That is not to say that OpenMW developers have been slacking off, however. Or that during the course of those 8 months we had much less progress. The reason for this delay was that our video editor’s computer broke down at a rather unfortunate and inconvenient time. When discussing whether the release should done without including a video, the decision was made that we would halt the release process until hardware issues were solved. After all, if anyone wants to play the up to date version of OpenMW, they needn’t wait for the release because they can use our nightlies, which we have recently made more visible by including them in the downloads page.

The good news is that while the release process was in limbo, work on the next version had already started and by the end of it had reached a point where we almost had enough to release version 0.43.0 the day after 0.42.0. At the time of this writing, we are sitting at 85 closed issues, making this release already larger than the previous. Check out the bugtracker for more detail.

A little more than a month ago we also saw the release of TES3MP version 0.6.0 and more recently a stability patch 0.6.1, with the next version possibly landing very soon at mid-September. Since TES3MP is built upon the OpenMW engine, we received part of the media attention and had a burst of new developer applications afterwards.

With new people on the board, there has been increased increased interest in improving our code documentation. One of our new coders is looking into possibly extending the .OSG animations or making it possible for OpenMW to read more than just Morrowind’s version of .nif files. Scrawl has released his incomplete experiments with shadows and an old member by the name of AnyOldName3 is trying to get them working, though he urges me to include that there’s no guarantee he’ll succeed. In addition, we’ve had the return of Aeslywinn, who in the past did some great work on OpenMW-CS and is back to continue where he left off.

A new feature of his that’s already been merged with OpenMW gives modders the comfort of being able to reload assets in OpenMW-CS without having to close and re-open the program. His next undertaking seems to be land records, which would be a step towards being able to edit landscape, the main missing feature in OpenMW-CS.

While we have enough issues closed to produce a rather sizable release, no call for the release process to start has been made yet. After all, we just released 0.42.0 only a brief time ago. It is likely that the upcoming version will be bigger than usual and will arrive in about two months, with the mentioned land records and other features currently being worked on possibly included. Overall, areas that remained stagnant a few months ago are now getting visible development and things are looking good for the OpenMW project.
 

Kalon

Scholar
Joined
Jan 21, 2016
Messages
189
I still don't understand what's the point of using OpenMW now considering that 1) I get good framerate and 2) I got exactly 2 CTDs in 3 years. What I really want to know is, does the OpenMW engine renders meshes differently, i.e. does it draw everything like the old engine, or just the meshes that are visible? Becasue that would be an improvement.
 

a cut of domestic sheep prime

Guest

He just keeps talking and talking in these incredibly broken sentences, moving from topic to topic, it is really quite hypnotic...
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
OpenMW is about the only game(engine) where I get significantly better performance on Linux than on Windows.
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
Only three issue remain? SO why is it 0.43?

As opposed to what number?
They follow the convention of simply increasing the count by one with each major version, there's no meaning like "percentage completed" or anything attached to it.

Besides, the project is in the habbit of revealing that somewhat basic behaviour has only been implemented/fixed in the most recent version - like e.g. the drowned NPC issue fixed in 0.43.
So, while you can finish the game and expansions with OpenMW for some time now, don't expect everything to work already, even though it's not mentioned very prominently.
 
Last edited:

potatojohn

Arcane
Joined
Jan 2, 2012
Messages
2,646
xPlXMGP.jpg


Wow, openmw performance has come a long way. 140 fps in Balmora in 4K on my potato 1050ti
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
It anyway is unlikely that OpenMW will acchieve compatibility to all mods out there.
They have stated that they won't reproduce specific engine bugs that are used by some mods.
Neither are they going to offer compatibility to MWSE (instead they want to expand the scripting capabilities of their engine).

So unfortunately a certain part of mods will never be able to run with OpenMW.
 

Gerrard

Arcane
Joined
Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,922
Bethesda will release their own remake before this is anywhere near completion.
:negative:
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom